Titles by This Editor

As the World Wide Web continues to expand, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to obtain information efficiently. Because most search engines read format languages such as HTML or SGML, search results reflect formatting tags more than actual page content, which is expressed in natural language. Spinning the Semantic Web describes an exciting new type of hierarchy and standardization that will replace the current "web of links" with a "web of meaning." Using a flexible set of languages and tools, the Semantic Web will make all available information -- display elements, metadata, services, images, and especially content -- accessible. The result will be an immense repository of information accessible for a wide range of new applications.This first handbook for the Semantic Web covers, among other topics, software agents that can negotiate and collect information, markup languages that can tag many more types of information in a document, and knowledge systems that enable machines to read Web pages and determine their reliability. The truly interdisciplinary Semantic Web combines aspects of artificial intelligence, markup languages, natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, intelligent agents, and databases.

The increased sophistication and availability of massively parallel supercomputers has had two major impacts on research in artificial intelligence, both of which are addressed in this collection of exciting new AI theories and experiments. Massively parallel computers have been used to push forward research in traditional AI topics such as vision, search, and speech. More important, these machines allow AI to expand in exciting new ways by taking advantage of research in neuroscience and developing new models and paradigms, among them associate memory, neural networks, genetic algorithms, artificial life, society-of-mind models, and subsumption architectures.

A number of chapters show that massively parallel computing enables AI researchers to handle significantly larger amounts of data in real time, which changes the way that AI systems can be built, which in turn makes memory-based reasoning and neural-network-based vision systems become practical. Other chapters present the contrasting view that massively parallel computing provides a platform to model and build intelligent systems by simulating the (massively parallel) processes that occur in nature.